Poetry

i. Between the confluence of the rivers, the smolt twist and die in massive turbines. Liaison between the proliferation, Nusoox and all the commissions, Yowanswickt watches the roll of dice, pitched in bone games, about irrigation, treaty and young, vulnerable fish. Dialogues with usurpers who are loquacious and convinced of the real in terms of…

Magpie calls bounce off the brittle branches flaring off the mountain’s dark. One’s wing just flew across the branch tips. Just the banner of himself he drew across. His darkness cast a kind of laugh against the brilliance of the icy bark. I remember iced branches out our window fifteen, sixteen years ago an ocean…

1. He looked at the seed for a long time. His mind did not comprehend. It did not flower anymore. The seed was just a seed.                                            She had said it was begonia. He tried to imagine what begonias looked like. Purple blossoms, rich yellow, supple orange, blue petals? The mind that made the seed…

If Earth is one of seven ancient wandering stars, where is that girl who, every afternoon,        runs water into a basin of hollow scales? Surely not in the vertical crowds, among colonizers and women passing in shallow hats. Nor riding with the plutonium makers, without hair or     explanations,        whose buckles glow in…

It’s not a fancy restaurant, nor is it a dump and it’s packed this Saturday night when suddenly a man leaps onto his tabletop, whips out his prick and begins sawing at it with a butter knife. I can’t stand it anymore! he shouts. The waiters grab him before he draws blood and hustle him…

She reclines, more or less. Try that posture, it’s hardly languor. Her right arm sharp angles. With her left she conceals her ambush. Shoes but not stockings, how sinister. The flower behind her ear is naturally not real, of a piece with the sofa’s drapery. The windows (if any) are shut. This is indoor sin….

The dreadlocks had all fallen off from chemotherapy, and so when Marley died in Switzerland they flew the body in the hold to Kingston, where he would lie in state, or in the anti-state he’d written all those hymns for, his face ironed into repose and sweet, or bland if sweet couldn’t be done. “Baldheads”…

    Everything is so dark under the baby, the table floats legless,     a rectangle of light. Around it the angels are bending their doctoral faces,     the baby unswaddled, undisturbed.     But can you see them? See the kleigs bearing down on the infant, throwing up a stark light     on the angels’ faces,…

Tamales plain-steamed then whitened like a wedding dress with cream and queso. A beautiful simple food. And not enough. We want more. We are cravers of storms and choques on the highway. We never mind waiting in the long stopped lines if at the end there can be some blood. Forget our lovers. We want…